In response to the accusations, the Police Department has denied using a quota system and points to its written policy forbidding racial profiling.

“Minorities are overwhelmingly the victims of violent crime in New York City, and the neighborhoods in which they live demand and deserve the Police Department’s attention,” the city’s executive assistant corporation counsel, Celeste Koeleveld, said in a statement about the coming trial. “Precinct by precinct, the rates at which minorities are stopped are consistent with the rates at which minorities are identified as crime suspects.”

The court is looking at a period in which there were 5 million police stops and only 12% resulted in arrests.

88 comments:

Well, the whole stop and frisk thing seems pretty iffy Constitution wise, but that's an old, dead, oppressive white people document anyway. On the other hand, if it's Constitutional, then they should mostly stop young minority men. Also, it works (whether it's legal or not).

The Broken Windows approach to policing (nip bad behaviors in the bud) is good for citizens but bad for criminals.

But lefties want us to go back to arresting only after the deed is done.

We will arrive soon at the sorry state of Britain, of which Theodore Dalrymple remarked:

"It is true that the British police have come to resemble not the force of uniformed citizens of which Sir Robert Peel (the founder of the modern police) dreamed, but a paramilitary occupier, feared mainly by the innocent and law-abiding. The police have become simultaneously bullying and ineffectual, the worst of all combinations, barking rudely at motorists who stop where they shouldn’t but disregarding manifestations of serious criminality entirely. The reasons for the degeneration of British policing are (again) complex, but one of them is the extreme leniency of the courts. For a long time, the police had little incentive to pursue criminals short of murderers, for the courts will impose a trivial punishment on them."

Cities like New York are on their way toward becoming like gated communities, private properties with special rules that you agree to obey once you pass the barrier. They should just write that into the incorporation documents. "People on this soil shall agree that the police can stop and frisk them at will without cause, and they shall also agree not to drink large amounts of sugary drink."

There is a connection between this case and the way people talk about it, and the article in Philadelphia Magazine that caused such a stir over the weekend. Huber's article addressed the bizarre disconnect that occurs when highly educated, mostly liberal white people, living in gentrifying neigborhoods of Philly where racial tensions are a daily presence, try to talk about race. As he shows, they mostly just don't, even when in fact they are (as in choosing a school for their kids, or dealing with local drug dealing, petty thefts, and on and on).

I doubt that the conversation (such as it is) will improve very much when the discourse is framed in legal language, as I suspect this case will show.

I look forward to the social experiment. It has been argued that stop and frisk is one reason why New York's homicide rate is so far below Chicago's. If stop and frisk goes away then it will be interesting to see what happens to the homicide rate in NYC.

Do they stop and frisk on Wall St? Imagine all the cocaine and little black books they'd find.

No doubt.

But Wall St. traders aren't committing crime on the street.

Big difference.

Your argument seems to hold water on a "fairness" level. In reality, when the streets are infested with hookers, dealers and stickup men, life becomes a nightmare. I was there when that was the reality in NYC, so I know.

If they do declare stop-and-frisk unconstitutional and police are prohibited from doing it, it will be interesting to see what happens to NYCs crime rate and homicide rate. Will citizens care if NYC becomes more like Chicago or (god forbid) Detroit? Or will they just shrug their shoulders and declare that it's just the cost of freedom?

Remember when the first lady went to the funeral of Hadiya Pendleton, 15, who was gunned down in Chicago, just a week after performing at an inaugural event.

Chicago doesn't have stop and frisk... While it is impossible to say for certain that that young girl would be alive today if Chicago had stop and frisk... Its safe to say her parents would probably be less uncertain.

Will citizens care if NYC becomes more like Chicago or (god forbid) Detroit?

The evidence is already in on that.

NYC hasn't elected a Democratic mayor or a black mayor since Dinkins.

Black rule is a disaster. But, it's good for Democratic Party crony politics and corruption.

We'll see if the lesson is forgotten over time. Or, whether a generation of kids some time hence decide that "fairness" is more important that maintaining the financial center of the world in working order.

Robert Cook's sentiments aside, the good people of Harlem are hoping against hope that this law stays in place and that they can continue to have a modicum of protection from the police. The people living in the projects are overwhelmed by the gangbangers loitering in their hallways and entrance ways and in the public areas. This stop and frisk has been a godsend to them. But liberals like Cook and those who filed this lawsuit do not give a rat's ass about the good people of Harlem when their own sanctimony is on the line.

But personally I don't give a rat's ass because like Robert Cook I do not go to Harlem and generally don't give a shit what happens to the good people trapped there. Tough shit for them, eh Robert Cook? I mean we wouldn't want them to totally disappear because of the lost votes but otherwise it would be fine if they just disappeared.

To add a bit to this - if the cops stop you, and question you, they can typically also frisk you for weapons. This is called a Terry stop, and is justified on the grounds of officer safety. In the past, the big question has been the discovery of drugs. They often don't feel like a weapon, so why do the cops get to look into your pockets when they feel them while ostensibly doing a weapons patdown?

One of the things that compounds it, or maybe makes this easier, depending on how you look at it, is that NYC has such strict gun laws, and esp. for concealed weapons, that if the cops pat someone down, and find a handgun, then it is very highly likely that it is illegal.

So, someone figured out that cops routinely stop and question suspicious people on the street. Always have, and hopefully always will (though I didn't look at it that way back when I was an adolescent male). Cops have decently good instincts, and the mere act of rousting people keesp crime down, even ignoring the frisking aspect.

So, someone put the normal stop and question together with Terry Stops, and, voila, got stop and frisk, which does work.

And, yes, it is applied on a discriminatory basis, since Black males in particular, in NYC, are statistically far, far, more likely to be engaged in criminal acts than pretty much anyone else. But, the cops should probably be applying it more based on age, dress, and actions, than on skin color. Someone wearing a hoody (up) and baggy pants should be more suspicious than someone who looks like a doctor or med student, and that should cut across all races.

The court is looking at a period in which there were 5 million police stops and only 12% resulted in arrests.

I always wonder how the stop/arrest comparison it supposed to work? I assume someone is using a apparently low arrest rate as a bad sign of something - racism probably. What's an acceptable arrest rate and how do you arrive at that number? What are the implications of forcing the police to have a high arrest rate? It doesn't seem the implications would necessarily be good.

Stop and frisk is clearly illegal without probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. You see what I did right there?

I bet Bloomberg would never stop and frisk white people with suits and ties on, even if he knew they'd find drugs and names of prostitutes they frequent.

It's the difference in method employed by those "people with suits and ties on" to find drugs and prostitutes that matters.

Those people buy their drugs in private in somebody's home or in a back room in the office. They find their prostitutes by personal reference or through some online reference.

The method is important. When these things are done out in the street by hustlers, they threaten the lives of everybody around them. Hustlers and prostitutes on the street corner threaten everybody who must live with that.

Get it? Your "fairness" obsession is irrelevant, at least to me. I don't give a shit about the fairness.

You're assuming that most muggings end in murder and that most murders occur during muggings.

Anyway, whereas a mugging might net the perp $50.00, or $100.00 or whatever, Wall Street crimes result in the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars (or billions) from the American people, and have resulted in home foreclosures and eviction of families from their homes. Wall Street thieves are gangsters of an order of magnitude well beyond Al Capone or John Gotti.

You're assuming that most muggings end in murder and that most murders occur during muggings.

Anyway, whereas a mugging might net the perp $50.00, or $100.00 or whatever, Wall Street crimes result in the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars (or billions) from the American people, and have resulted in home foreclosures and eviction of families from their homes. Wall Street thieves are gangsters of an order of magnitude well beyond Al Capone or John Gotti.

We're not talking Solly and da boys, we're talking street punks on the order of the little darlings that jumped Bernhard Goetz.

Most muggings do end in some form of violence (consider twice as many assaults as robberies in LA, for example), but we must destroy capitalists above all.

You can't pay the rent, the terms were spelled out. If you can't afford the home, don't buy it. And let's remember, evil Wall Street capitalists were required by the Feds to honor those loans. Your heroes, the community organizers, were the enforcers, remember?

If you own a small business, you can pretty much count on an IRS audit. An IRS audit is to stop and frisk as a colonoscopy is to having your pulse taken. I wonder what proportion of IRS audits lead to conviction. I wonder if entrepeneurial ethnics are audited more than other groups? If it turns out tha whites are audited more than blacks is this an example of racial profiling?

Get it? Your "fairness" obsession is irrelevant, at least to me. I don't give a shit about the fairness.

I wasn't referring to fairness. I meant hard results. 9 out of 10 times cops were wrong on stop and frisk. Would they have a better rate if they just patrolled Wall St, or white neighborhoods? Hard to do any worse than 9 out of 10 wrong stops.

And would you still support stop and frisk if 10 out of 10 times the person was completely innocent of wrongdoing?

HSBC bank recently admitted to having laundered millions of dollars for drug cartels. Here you have a financial institution not only stealing money from you and me but also engaging in transactions that further the murders committed by the drug cartels.

Also, as Elizabeth Warren pointed out recently, while an individual arrested with an ounce of cocaine may face quite a stiff prison sentence, the executives of HSBC will simply pay a fine (out of HSBC reserves, not their personal funds), and go to sleep at night in their own beds and will not face even the possibility of jail time.

I'm been mugged once and held up on the job at gunpoint. (Both events occurred back in the 80s.) In neither instance was I physically harmed and the most I lost was $40.00 cash in one instance and somewhat less than that (I forget the actual sum) in the other. I say only this to point out that I am not unaware of the reality of street crime.

Garage. "And would you still support stop and frisk if 10 out of 10 times the person was completely innocent of wrongdoing?"

Yes. The object of stop and frisk is to deter crime. If you cannot be stopped and frisked the gun that you left hidden at home can now be safely pocketed. If you cannot be stopped and frisked the crack can be kept on the person.

I remember the 80's. Kids were carrying guns almost as a fashion accessory. To complete the look, they wore their best penitentary face. "Mess with me, and I'll leave you so fucked up, your mother won't recognize you." The result was that many kids wer literally scaring each other to death. They felt it necessary to pull out a gun and kill someone simply because of a hostile stare. Prudent precaution. If you think cops profile minority teenagers, you should see the way minority teenagers profile minority teenagers.

Probably more so than to arrest someone. Plus, how often does an officer detect a crime but not make an arrest? Jay walking, disturbing the peace, possession of a joint, public drunkeness, open containter,... Stuff where a warning and an order to go home suffice, but are technically illegal.

How do you know? How much of your tax dollars might have gone to HSBC? How much of our collective tax dollars have gone to fight the drug cartels, drug cartels whose criminal activities have been furthered by HSBC's actions on their behalf, (and by the American government by extension in not bringing criminal charges against them)? How much of our tax dollars are spent on incarceration of the very criminals (and their underlings) that HSBC has enabled?

And even if HSBC's crimes have not specifically touched you, they have touched others. Shouldn't they be held accountable and put in prison for their crimes against others, just as street criminals are?

The problem with the white collar crime here is that the justification for frisking in most cases is officer safety, and there isn't an issue of officer safety in most cases of white collar crime.

Or, to put it a little differently - the cops stop someone and worry about them pulling a gun on them, so they frisk them, just to be safe. As I pointed out above, that is a Terry Stop, and is typically legal. But what is the white collar equivalent?

The funny thing is though is that some of these white collar crooks likely did affect the officer's security, just not their physical security, but rather their financial security. State and municipal government worker pensions have been some of the biggest victims of financial fraud. This is likely because of a couple things. One is that pay-to=play is more accepted in the government than elsewhere, so there are instances of crooks paying for entry into the pension market. Secondly, these are typically defined benefit plans, instead of the defined contribution plans much more typical outside the government. So, there is a big incentive to get big returns, because big returns means lower contributions, which means more money available for pay raises. But, big returns means big risk, and once they lose money once, the pressure is even higher to get even higher returns next time. And, if it is too good to be true, it probably is, but any good con requires the victim to be greedy, and government pensions were esp. vulnerable here. So, ultimately, you have the government pension problem we see now.

I'd bet most of those singing the praises of "stop and frisk" as a crime-busting policy would howl grievously if suddenly they found themselves subjected to frequent stops by the police, to be manhandled and treated with disdain or contempt. Their condescension to those who must submit to it now is made possible by their confidence they will rarely or never be subject to this treatment themselves.

Robert Cook. I go through the TSA kabuki two times a week at a minimum. As the dumbshits in line have it, it is being done to keep us safe. I would submit that the benefits to New Yorkers from stop and frisk vastly outweigh the benefits to society from TSA theatre.

The gate attendant in Boston was mighty suspicious of Atta because of his attitude and his racial ID, but he deliberately did not profile Atta because he thought it would be discriminatory to stop him.

Earlier, Atta had sought to rent a room in suburban NJ near Teterboro airport. His behavior was very strange, and the landlord thought that he should report it, but he didn't, also because he didn't want to seem "bigoted."

Robert Cook. I agree that poor blacks should not have gotten home loans from HSBC or any other bank. These lending practices were borne of US requirements that banks significantly increase lending on these very terms. There would have been no problem if the borrowers, the poor unqualified blacks, had kept the terms of their contracts with the bank and repaid their loans as they had promised and guaranteed.

"Stop and frisk" is probably unconstitutional, but - Heather Macdonald:"Crime in New York City has dropped 80% since the early 1990s, a decline unmatched anywhere in the country. ...Most significant, more than 10,000 black and Hispanic males avoided the premature death that would have been their fate had New York's homicide rate remained at its early-1990s apex....Omitted from these critics' complaints is any recognition of the demographics of crime. Blacks were 62% of the city's murder victims in 2011, even though they are only 23% of the population. They also made up a disproportionate share of criminals, committing 80% of all shootings, nearly 70% of all robberies and 66% of all violent crime, according to crime reports filed with the NYPD by victims and witnesses, usually minorities themselves.

Whites, by contrast, committed a little over 1% of all shootings, less than 5% of all robberies, and 5% of all violent crime in 2011, even though they are 35% of New York City's population."

Garage: The government did not mandate providing loans to the unqualified but they did mandate heightened lending to the African American cohort: a distinction without a difference in many cases.

you know all this, of course, but want to be on the side of those who believe that evil bankers lurked in the shadows and then compelled stupid black people to borrow money they did not want or need at rates they would be too stupid to know were too high or that the lending standards had been ignored to trick them into getting money that they would have to pay back. You keep believing that, dude.

Stop-and-Frisk, as a policy, may still violate the norms of that case.

I guess if the Officer can give an articulable statement of suspicion for detaining/questioning, he would then have an Officer-safety-related reason to conduct a physical search for weapons.

If the Officer can't give such a reason, then the stop is unConstitutional.

My question is this: if NYC's weapons law weren't so strict, and Police knew that some members of the public had valid License to Carry, how would the Stop-and-Frisk work? If the officer finds both a weapon and a valid carry permit, would it lead to an admonition to keep safe, keep the nose clean, and carry on?

In my home State (Michigan), there's an explicit requirement for Concealed Pistol License holders to inform an Officer investigating a crime of CPL status, and whether or not any weapons are carried. The exact process isn't outlined clearly, but I imagine the best method of informing the Officer would be something like: "Officer, if you need to see my ID, I'll also have a CPL to show you...", followed by some comment about whether or not a weapon is being carried.

The only reason NYC doesn't have gun crime rates similar to Chicago is stop and frisk. Stop and frisk is the reason why NYC is so damn safe (relatively speaking). God knows NYC's gun laws are as restrictive as any.

I am not passing judgment on stop and frisk as a civil rights issue, but it is worth noting that the only thing keeping the peace in societies with little or no gun rights is the iron boot of the government. Since the stop and frisk iron boot stomps mainly on the necks of blacks, and since blacks are disproportionately responsible for crime (generally against other blacks), watch for a spike in crime in NYC and a huge increase in black murder victims after the city loses this case.

All thanks to the leftists who love blacks so much they first take away all their guns and then take away their police protection.

Stop-and-Frisk, as a policy, may still violate the norms of that case [Terry v. Ohio].

I am sure that a lot of them do, at least in practice. The cops are invariably good at after-the-fact justifications for their actions. They will do just fine articulating a legitimate (i.e. non-racial) reason to be reasonably suspicious, whenever they are questioned about it. "Your honor, the party was acting furtative, and looked like he was getting ready to run when he saw us. Also saw a bulge in his pocket that looked like a gun..."

But don't really know the way that policy is written up. It could be written up as specifically stated in Terry, et seq., and then there was a wink and a nod about the profiling side of it. Enough to give the department plausible deniability.

Robert Cook: And even if HSBC's crimes have not specifically touched you, they have touched others. Shouldn't they be held accountable and put in prison for their crimes against others, just as street criminals are?

Sure. But just how is using stop and frisk on Wall Street going to stop the ongoing global bankster gang rape? That's why complex financial fraud perps haven't been brought to book, 'cause they escape inspection by street cops?

Either street crime can be a problem, or financial corruption, but not both at the same time in the same universe? And if you'd like to walk down a city street unmolested by street thugs, you must be cool with white collar thuggery? Or it's somehow immoral to want to be safe from muggers and murderers as long as fat cat miscreants are still roaming free? Hey, nobody's swung for the MF Global brigandage, guess it would be churlish to complain about a beat-down here or a rape there, eh?

I'm deeply impressed by the idiocy here of presenting this as an either/or. (Not saying you're the only one here doing this.)

I'm pointing out that many people who won't be subject to this violation of their 4th Amendment rights find it easy to excuse the violation of the 4th amendment for "those people" on the basis of all the harm they do. I simply pointed out that the harm done by white collar criminals was far greater than that done by street criminals.

In other words, if we're going to excuse violation of the 4th amendment because we are alarmed at street criminals, why should we not also simply erase the Bill of Rights altogether in the name of averting all crime before it happens, particularly the crimes that really hurt, (i.e., white collar crimes)?

Most of the stop-and-frisks at issue in this lawsuit are of people going in and out of buildings with no doormen. That puts the law-abiding people in those buildings at risk, of robbers and drug dealers. So they asked the police to come in and bring a little order to their buildings, keep the gang bangers and dealers out. Now no self-respecting liberal grandee thinks there's any problem with living in a doorman building. But God forbid that the police try to give some of that same security to poor people living in a high rise hell.